hi guys

im a newbie to shell scripting and would appreciate any help possible. my questions will be very straight forward and relatively trivial to most of you.

as the thread title is asking, what are the operators??

i know there's the != and =, but for bourne and c shell, what are the lexical comparison operators?

i read from a website that you could use the < and > as long as you put the forward slash in front of them so that the shell interpreter can identify it as a string operator as opposed to a redirect operator.

this is a snippet of code i've been trying the > and < operators but the tcshell wont work with it. i'musing tcshell while i want to know for bourne and c shell because that's the only shell i have access to at the moment.

anyways here's the code

######################################
set VAR1="hi"
set VAR2="bye"

if [ $VAR1 \< $VAR2 ] ; then
echo "$VAR1 is lexically less than $VAR2"
else
echo "$VAR1 is lexically greater than $VAR2"
fi
exit 0

######################################

basically the shell can't interpret the \< part. any help appreciated.

thanks in advance

In sh/ksh, you dont need to escape the < or >. They are recognized operators. So the hi-lited line would become if [ $VAR1 < $VAR2 ] ; then

Now in the unix world, < or > stands for redirecting input, output respectively. Since you need the literal meaning of "lesser than", you should use the following construct. Again the hi-lited line would become

if [[ $VAR1 < $VAR2 ]] ; then

Notice the extra [].

From man ksh

thanks for the heads, up, i will have to try that out tomorrow, it apparently doesnt work on my school's intranet.

it says it cant interpret the double brackets "[["

is sh and ksh similar to bash?

my school's vmware workstation has the bash shell so i'm going to try the < and > operators for strings there.

You are using tcsh. Make the first line of your script look like

#! /bin/sh

or

#! /bin/ksh

Now that you mention VMWare, I dont have access to a VMWare machine right now. But try including that line as the first line in your script and then run.

yeah i already had the #!/bin/sh before the script code and it wont work

it says it cannot open bye (second variable evaluates to bye and it thinks of bye as a file meaning it interprets the "<" as a redirect operator).

and i also tried not using that first line on the script and using double brackets and it says: [[ not found.

Post the script you are using.

And the error message as-is.

intranet (119) % sh strcmp.sh
hi bye
strcmp.sh: bye: cannot open <-- error message


so i'm using the < as a string operator but it detects it as a redirect.

and basically A and B are read in from the keyboard

thanks for your patience by the way, i know it's late, at least where i live hehe